The Ventures – (The) Ventures In Space (1964)

“I had a couple of Ventures records before I got this one. That’s the way it was back then – people just had Ventures records. If you went to somebody’s house, there were always one or two Ventures albums sitting around.

“They were a huge band, almost ubiquitous for a while. And for kids who liked rock guitars, this was the band you listened to. Nowadays, everybody cites the same artists as being the formative ones – Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and guys like that – but a few years before, it was The Ventures. They were just everywhere.

“Ventures In Space was something of a left turn. On the cover, instead of their Fenders were these other weird guitars nobody had ever heard of called Moserites. That blew people’s minds right away. And the sound was really different: All of a sudden, they had a really distinctive, in-your-face, attacking kind of sound, way more so than what they got with their Fenders. It was different, it was surprising, and it worked really well.

“The music’s just so good on this record. What The Ventures could do with electric guitars and steel guitars was absolutely incredible. Every so often they’d shove something down a Leslie speaker – very basic technology – and they made it sound cool and futuristic. It still sounds fresh, too.”